Harry Potter author JK Rowling has urged fans of her books not to give money to orphanages.

The writer and philanthropist took part in a Facebook Live chat recently for her Lumos charity with the aim of highlighting the plight of an estimated eight million children around the world who live in the institutions.

“All of the research agrees that there is little you can do worse for a child than put it in an institution,” she explained. “We want to help children and that’s an honourable and admirable thing. However, you may be contributing towards real harm.”

Lumos’s website states that around 90 percent of children in institutions have not lost both parents and are likely to have been separated from their families for reasons of poverty or discrimination. You can watch the interview below.

The charity is campaigning to reunite children currently living in orphanages with their families or re-home them with new ones, as well as providing support to help keep children with their parents.

Rowling added: “If you take nothing else away tonight, I’d like you to remember this is a solvable problem.

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“Eight million children is an unfathomably large number – it’s so hard to really take in what that means, eight million – but we can solve it. We absolutely do need funds but we need to change minds. If we change minds we will change lives.”